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ESX Passthrough of AMD Ryzen Integrated Graphics (iGPU)

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I recently had a conversation with Wenchao (creator of AMD Zen4/Zen5 IPMI Thermal Driver for ESX Fling and Realtek Network Driver for ESX Fling) about the incredible work he has done to support the VMware/Broadcom community. His latest contributions has really closed the capability gap when running ESX on popular AMD Ryzen platforms like the Minisforum MS-A2, which been an ideal system for running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 in a lab environment.

The only remaining capability we have not yet been able to take advantage of is the integrated graphics (iGPU) on modern AMD Ryzen systems, which have become surprisingly powerful for running AI models.

While this has been a topic I have researched quite extensively and even spent time debugging with Engineering, it is always great to get a new perspective on things. I kid you not, a few days later Wenchao came back with a solution that had a few caveats which I was able to help iron out with some of my prior experience in this area. 😆

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AMD Zen4/Zen5 IPMI Thermal Driver for ESX Fling

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Happy Friday! 🥳

A couple of weeks back, Wenchao (creator of the Realtek Network Driver for ESX Fling) reached out to me to share an exciting development he had been working on.

Unlike traditional enterprise hardware, which typically includes an Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) for exposing various hardware statistics, consumer systems like the popular Minisforum MS-A2 lack this capability out of the box.

Wenchao has developed a pseudo-IPMI driver for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 platforms that surfaces the CPU thermal and I am excited to share this will be released as a new Fling!


In addition to viewing this information via the vSphere UI, users can also retrieve the raw metrics via ESXCLI:

esxcli hardware ipmi sdr list


The driver currently supports the following:

  • ESX 9.1
  • ESX 9.0.x
  • ESX 8.0 Update 3

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Quick Tip: Workaround for NSX Edge Upgrade to VCF 9.0.1 running AMD Ryzen CPUs

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If you are planning to upgrade to latest release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0.1 and you are using an AMD Ryzen (consumer) processor, you will need to apply an additional workaround after your NSX Edges have been upgraded, for proper functionality. This is similar to the workaround that I had shared back in 2020, which is needed when deploying a new VCF 9.x environment due to the incompatibility of NSX Edges running on an AMD Ryzen CPU.

UPDATE (01/20/26) - VCF 9.0.2, the structure of the config.py has changed, you will need to identify the correct lines to comment out the AMD section. There is a more simpler workaround that can now be applied for all VCF releases, which you can find more details in this blog post HERE.

After the NSX Edge node has been upgraded, the modifications to the original system files are not persisted and we need to re-apply the changes before the NSX Edge nodes will run properly.

Thanks to Tomas Fojta for sharing this tidbit while upgrading his environment, which happens to run on an AMD Ryzen system.

Step 1 - SSH to the NSX Edge node as root

Step 2 - Edit /os_bak/opt/vmware/nsx-edge/bin/config.py and comment out L192-193 containing the AMD section and that will allow the NSX Edge to properly startup and complete the upgrade flow.